Too often in digital marketing we focus on the individual parts of a campaign without focusing on the whole patient experience. The first impression you make with new patients occurs well before they are greeted at your front desk; it all starts online. 

Digital marketing is not simply choosing the right keyword or writing the right ad copy that will make your campaign successful. Instead, you must build quality-control campaigns with clear, stated goals that cater to individuals rather than your topic area. Quality-control campaigns ensure you reach the right audience, rather than a general, larger audience that might not be relevant. In order to fully understand this concept, let’s break down the individual steps and see how they all fit together.

1. The campaign goal

Every campaign, digital or otherwise, should have a stated end goal. Very often, campaigns are missing the bigger picture without a specific goal in mind. If your business does not have specific goals in mind, the results of your campaign might not align with your business plans or you could be targeting the wrong audience. You can look at the performance of your campaign and measure your return on investment (ROI), but because you had no specific goal, your results will lack the context necessary to make informed decisions for your next campaign. 

Quick tip: The more specific you are, the easier the subsequent steps become.

2. The target audience

If you have created a specific goal, defining your target audience should flow easily from there. A common mistake is looking at the target audience and only thinking in terms of demographics: people in specific age-groups who live in a specific geographic area, or people who have already expressed interest in your products or services. In addition to demographics, you must develop individual audience profiles. These profiles help anchor the campaign and humanize the target audience. 

Quick tip: With audience profiles, you should ask the question, “Does this ad speak to Jim, father of four from Philadelphia and a huge Eagles fan?” instead of “Does this ad speak to 40- to 50-year-old men from the Philadelphia area?”

3. Configuring the trigger

The trigger is what decides whether or not your ad will display. Some digital ads are displayed as soon as someone who fits your criteria lands on the site in which you are advertising. These are easy to configure, as you have already defined your target audience. Search ads, on the other hand, are triggered by a user searching a specific keyword. How do you choose the keywords you want to target? You choose the keywords that are relevant to your campaign goal. Which keywords would people in your target audience be searching for that are relevant to your product or service? There are a number of good keyword tools out there that can generate a whole list of keywords from one relevant seed keyword. From there, you can eliminate the generated ones that are not relevant and include the ones that are.

Quick tip: Seed keywords are the starting place for search engine optimization (SEO). They are your base or foundation keywords, short, simple and with no modifiers – usually one or two words. Example: a seed keyword might be as simple as “blouse.”

4. Creating the ad

Your ads must clearly communicate what your product or service is. When people click on it, they end up on a landing page that doesn’t surprise them. This will also save the money you would have spent on irrelevant or non-productive clicks. Less clicks are fine if each click is more relevant to your campaign goal.

Quick tip: Ad creatives should show off your brand and stand out from the clutter of search results pages and social media feeds. 

• Use high-quality, unique imagery
• Keep your captions concise
• Use the 20 percent rule: text on photos should take up less than 20 percent of the creative ad space
• Video always receives better engagement

5. The landing page experience

There are two things you are trying to achieve with your landing pages:

• Relevance to your ad
• Conversions 

Relevance to your ad means that people who click on your ad should feel like they have landed in the right place. The copy on your landing page should speak directly to the ad copy. If you have an image in your ad, be sure the landing page features the same imagery. Both of these things will reduce the amount of people that immediately leave your landing page. Conversions means that once within your landing page, there is usually some kind of a goal that you want people to complete. Sometimes that means dialing a phone number or submitting a contact form. 

Quick tip: Whatever the goal is, your landing page should be designed to attract attention no matter the device being used.

6. The conversion “next steps”

Be sure that a plan is in place to handle the conversions after they are made. If your conversion is a contact form that generates an email, who receives that email? How are they supposed to respond? If it’s a phone call, is the receiver aware of the campaign? 

Quick tip: This is often a forgotten step of the digital campaign process, despite its importance. Make a checklist with these seven steps so you never forget again.

7. The analysis and conclusions

Once your campaign has run its course, take a second to analyze your results. Did you meet, exceed or fall short of your goal? What happened? Why did it happen? What worked? What didn’t? What knowledge gained from this campaign could be applied to other campaigns? 

Quick tip: Looking backward may seem like a waste of time, but the real waste is not using the important data you have gathered to drive future decisions.

Paid Search and SEO

Although paid search results continue to take up more and more of the search result pages (SERPs), it’s important to remember the majority of the result page real estate belongs to organic results. On-site optimization will ensure your landing pages will appear for both paid and organic search. On-site optimization includes the mechanical aspects of website maintenance to improve your website’s search engine rankings. This may include meta descriptions, image optimization and other activities.

Summary

Running a campaign is like performing a science experiment. You have your goal, which is a combination of a purpose and a hypothesis. You have your plan, which is the equivalent of your method. Then, you perform the experiment and gather data. From there, you analyze your results and form your conclusions.

Key takeaways:

• Create a specific campaign goal. Never lose sight of it! Everything else flows from here.
• Relevance is huge! Ads should be relevant to your product/service, Landing pages should be relevant to your ads, etc.
• Analyze your results. How else will you learn and improve?
• Optimize your website for both paid and organic search

Points Group is a marketing and consulting agency with a focus on healthcare. We are fully equipped to run both digital and traditional campaigns on behalf of your practice, all while working closely with you to ensure they run smoothly. If it sounds like we might be a good fit, give us a call at 973-998-8008 or get in touch with us online here.